Survey: 13% of Russians have experience in mining or buying crypto

January 16, 2019

Though 42% of Russian citizens do not use cryptocurrencies at all, 7% of Russians tried to mine crypto, whereas another 6% did invest into it, as the new survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab reveals. Among those who have ever made cryptocurrency transactions 8% do it on a daily basis.

According to the new survey by Kaspersky Lab, more than a third of Russians (37%) are aware of cryptocurrency but do not understand how it works. At the same time, 42% of those polled do not use crypto and are not planning to do so in the nearest future.

Meanwhile, 7% of respondents have already tried themselves in mining, while another 6% invested in cryptocurrencies. Moreover, 8% of those who ever made crypto payments do it every day.

In turn, 5% of Russians had tried to invest in crypto but later gave up on this idea. Lack of money (34%) and unprofitability (35%) turned out to be the two most common reasons for doing so. Every ninth cryptocurrency user confessed he couldn’t trust virtual currencies any more, whereas every eighth reported loss of money to crypto fraudsters.

“Users’ wariness regarding cryptocurrencies is quite understandable: for many, it is something new, unstable, non-physical. In contrast, related resources and money are very real. As are the risks. For example, 2% of users polled have already lost some of their crypto savings to malware attacks,” – Alexey Malanov, Kaspersky Lab’s anti-virus expert noted.

Malanov added that according to observations made by Kaspersky Lab, hackers “are being increasingly involved in stealing coins from crypto wallets, attacking crypto exchanges and cryptojacking”.

According to earlier findings by Kaspersky Lab, the average cost of a stolen digital profile in the darknet is $1. They believe in the company that “unrealistic expectations about implementing blockchain outside the cyptocurrency sphere will soon disappear” as key individuals and organizations start realizing that blockchain has rather a narrow scope of application.